We Stand Alone
by Chase Network
Summary: Hatake Kakashi: Elite Jonin, ANBU Captain, War Veteran, Master of 1,000 Jutsu. The attack by the Demon Brother's of the Mist awoke this retired legend, and he has more to teach his soldiers than merely how to walk on trees. Enter Team 7, the Stand Alone Regiment.


Title: We Stand Alone

Summary: Hatake Kakashi: Elite Jonin, ANBU Captain, War Veteran, Master of 1,000 Jutsu. The attack by the Demon Brother's of the Mist awoke this retired legend, and he has more to teach his soldiers than merely how to walk on trees. Enter Team 7, the Stand Alone Regiment.

Chapter 01: Lower than Trash

There; one-hundred, fifty meters ahead off the side of the beaten dirt road. Jonin of Konohagakure no Sato, Hatake Kakashi, had sighted two distinct puddles of water, flanking either side of the road, almost perfectly even with each other. In Hi no Kuni, home of Konohagakure no Sato, fresh water sources were few and far between. Travelers would not be wasting their water in any such fashion. Likewise, Hi no Kuni has not seen rain in a few weeks. All this meant that this was a trap, laid by someone who isn't from around these parts, and also hasn't been in the area for long to determine the effective application of such a trap.

Kakashi raised a gloved hand to ruffle his spiky white hair as he looked up from his pink-bound pornography book to observe the young Genin under his command. The blonde haired boy clothed in heavy orange sweats to hide his emancipated body, Uzumaki Naruto, was chatting amicably to his two teammates about nonsensical things, ignorant of the fact he was being ignored. The brunette boy wearing a blue tee and khaki shorts, Uchiha Sasuke, was just walking with a slouched posture and hands in his pockets, casually looking around while ignoring his teammate. Kakashi saw that Sasuke had indeed seen the puddles, but passed them over without a second thought. The third child was a pink haired girl wearing a pink dress hardly capable of movement, Haruno Sakura. She was also walking along quietly, shooting Sasuke looks of adoration every so often, albeit she had better posture. The final member of their little party was an older brunette man wearing a sakkat rice hat and taking swigs of sake, Tazuna. He seemed to have a more urgent gait in his walk than normal. His Genin never noticed it, simply because it was a leisurely pace for them. Civilians don't walk fast without distress.

Their destination was the Nami no Kuni. The nearest shinobi village to that area was Kirigakure no Sato, housed in Mizu no Kuni. That village was in the process of a civil war between The Bloodlines and The Purists. As such, the village itself isn't available for mission requests, however, the civil war had released an outbreak of Missing Nin. Many of these Missing Nin are willing to take all ranges of mission requests for prices lower than the shinobi villages would require. Ninja from Kirigakure no Sato definitely fit the bill for whoever set this trap. The only duo he could think of off the top of his head were the Demon Brothers of the Mist. A pair of individually C-rank threats, being that they were just Chunin, but together represented a B-rank threat.

Seventy-five meters left until engagement. Kakashi sighed as he glanced back at his team. A momentary flash of his old teammates, Rin and Uchiha Obito showed up in place of his little Genin. A light sweat developed under his collar as he again watched Obito get crushed by boulders. His left arm suddenly got extremely hot, and he felt the hot sweat roll down it inside his suit with a hype sensitivity as his post traumatic stress kicked in, and he saw his arm inside of Rin. He set his eyes back to his book as he imperceptibly snarled under his mask. He and his team would have words after this.

He waited until they were a mere five meters from the puddles before he acted. The split second the Demon Brothers of the Mist began to rise from their Genjutsu generated puddles, Kakashi formed a cross seal behind the cover of his book, and muttered a quick Kage Bunshin no Jutsu. A pair of solid doppelgangers phased into existence with a small puff of smoke, but disappeared just as fast as a pair of rocks took there place, and fell to the ground. Tazuna and the Genin halted with their mouths gaping at the scene in front of them. To their eyes, nothing had been wrong, and before they could even register what happened, Kakashi had two clones, each behind one of the Missing Nin. One of them had a kunai firmly lodged from under the jaw to the brain, killing the ninja. The other clone was holding the other Missing Nin in a full nelson to prevent the man from being able to get his hands together from Ninjutsu, with a pair of kunai crossed over the gaps in the spine behind the head, pressing hard enough to draw blood, and promising a near instant death at any hint of resistance. The real Kakashi casually strode over to the restrained ninja and snapped his book shut, leveling a hard glare at the man, promising eternal pain. "What did you think you were doing here?"

Meizu gulped as he tried his best to relax under the current conditions. He cast a furtive glance at his deceased brother before returning to meet the gaze of the enraged Jonin. "So, this is the power of Konoha's Kakashi. To think that we couldn't even see you do anything before we were already defeated. Unbelieva- Gurk!" Meizu was cut off as Kakashi swiftly pulled out a kunai and slammed it down into his left collar bone, then left it.

"You will answer my question." The "or you will suffer" was ominously left out.

"Okay, okay! We were hired by Gato to kill the bridge builder!"

"Gato... as in Gato of the Gato Shipping Corporation?"

"Yeah!"

"Who else has he hired?"

"Momochi Zabuza!"

"The Demon of the Mist. Were you hired with the same objective?"

"Yeah, Gato really wants to have the bridge builder's head!"

"Why does he want Tazuna?"

"We don't ask question when we take jobs." At that, Kakashi slammed a closed fist on the butt of the kunai lodged in the man's collar bone, shoving it deeper and eliciting a scream from the man.

"Is that all you have to tell me?"

"It's all! I swea-!" His last breath left his plea unfinished as the Kakashi clone viced the kunai into his neck, severing the vertebrae, and the rest of the head with it. The head hit the dirt with a dull thud with the decapitated body following suit. Naruto was the first to recover from the ordeal.

"Kakashi-sensei, he was defeated." he said shakily. Kakashi turned his still baleful glare towards Naruto. "He didn't need to-!" He was cut off as in an instant, Kakashi was in his face, crouched down with fist firmly planted in an uppercut to Naruto's stomach, winding the small boy and inducing pain. Kakashi's clones began to police the corpses of the Demon Brothers of the Mist while the original continued Naruto's punishment. Sasuke and Sakura just watched in fear, and Tazuna braced himself against a tree as he stood shocked at Kakashi's treatment of Naruto. Kakashi saw the childish Obito replace Naruto for a split second.

"Do you think this is a fucking game, Naruto? This is the military world! There's no heroics out here! There's only one cold, hard truth out here, and that's the cooled over carcass' of your comrades that you have to bury after a mission, because you weren't good enough, fast enough, strong enough, smart enough to save them! We have to fight for selfish pieces of shit like Tazuna, and die for them because they hide information from us, because our leaders tell us to! There's nothing like the fairy tales out here like saving princess' from oppressive tyrants! If you want to save all of your comrades in this world, you have to kill everyone who opposes you to prevent them from coming back ever again! You want to be strong enough to do that? Then there will be no joy for you! You will be pushed to near death every day by your own God damned choice every single day to achieve the power you will need to save the people who are close to you! You are less than trash, Naruto! Your lack of dedication to your training, refusal to maintain military baring, and cross negligence of your duties merely prove to me that you want your team to die, because your facilitating it with your actions!" Naruto collapsed crying as Kakashi got up and briskly walked over Sakura, kunai in hand. For a split second, he saw Rin, and considered how Sakura was nothing like her. Sakura backed up, fearful of Kakashi's wrath.

"Haruno Sakura, why the fuck is your hair below your collar?" Sakura raised a hand to try and defend herself, but Kakashi grabbed it, twisted it hard to force Sakura to turn around, and shoved her into a tree. He then forcefully grabbed her long, pink hair just above her neck in a tight pony tail, then severed it all in a single stroke of the kunai knife, all the while Sakura was pleading with him not to do it. "You're the only Kunoichi to graduate in the last decade to have grossly neglected their duties as a ninja! You graduated top of the class due to sheer intellectual knowledge of the topic, but openly dismiss all of it! Ninja are required to keep their hair above the collar to present a professional military image, yet you let it hang like some civilian trying to look pretty for a boy, as you evidently are! You refuse to train any of your ninja skills or even maintain a healthy diet so that you can have energy to do anything on a mission! All of this leaves you to be a liability that is intentionally abandoning her team, and facilitating their inevitable deaths! You are less than trash!" Kakashi turned sharply to Sasuke, who was trying hard to keep his cool.

"Then there's you, the worst of the worst!" Sasuke reminded him of himself when he was younger to the point that it almost scared him. Like with Naruto, Kakashi crouched down and uppercut Sasuke, who tried to feebly cross his arms to block the strike, but was rewarded with Kakashi bringing his other fist down in a hammer fist over Sasuke's head, slamming him into the ground with a splitting headache. "You think you're hot shit and consider yourself the elite and best, just cause of another stupid name? A fucking word? You refuse to dedicate yourself to your training, instead merely spending your time contemplating a plan of how to kill your brother, which can't happen! Your brother graduated early, and was already a Jonin faster than you even made Genin! You obviously don't give a fuck about your personal objectives, so how the fuck can you be expected to care about the objectives of your village and nation, which come first, before anything you want personally! The gross negligence of your duties just now was facilitation of the death of your team! This is grounds of betrayal, and punishable by death! These two look up to you, Sasuke! You have a responsibility to them as their leader among peers! You are stronger, faster, and smarter than either of them, but for all that, you're still a fucking moron! Until you get your shit strait, you're nothing more than a traitor, a murderer of your own team! You are less than trash!" Kakashi stood up and planted a swift boot in his downed student's stomach before turning to Tazuna, who began to fear for his life. Kakashi strode up to Tazuna, making the man press himself up against the tree he was leaning against in fear.

"You will explain everything. Meizu said that they and the A-ranked Missing Nin, Momochi Zabuza, were sent to kill you by Gato, but couldn't explain why. Talk. Now."

"Yeah, sure. Gato has a stranglehold on the economics and trade of Nami no Kuni. He's blockaded all sea routes and controls all of it, taxing us all heavily for anything we try to get in, sucking us dry. In response, I rallied the country into helping me build a massive bridge to Hi no Kuni, so that we could have a way to get trade and supplies into the country without having to rely on Gato's shipping magnet. However, none of my countrymen are motivated to the task due to fear of Gato's oppression, and are helping me only under influence of my charisma and leadership. Due to the needs of the people being alive to rake in cash, Gato can't just go and have them all killed off. That's why he needs me dead. He kills me, he kills the will of my people."

"I see, and I assume you hired only Genin because it was about all the cash your country could scrounge for help. Am I right?"

"That's right." Kakashi turned over to monitor his Genin, who were recovered and watching him out of fear.

"Listen up, you fucking pieces of shit! You are all, from now on, only Genin on a probation status, pending imprisonment for attempted betrayal of comrades! We are continuing this mission! You might die, but until then, I'm going the beat the fucking shit out of you, and getting your shit strait so that you might be able to be ninja worth representing our village! From now on, you will explicitly only refer to me as Captain Kakashi, or Captain! You three are my bitches until you are removed from my command, and perform exactly as I tell you to without fail! We will make proper soldiers out of you! Am I understood!"

The three Genin straightened up and shouted out a quick "Yes sir!" that resounded throughout the clearing.


End file.
